Kirin's Rise of the Runelords

Into the Glassworks

The next morning saw Shalelu and Emrael once again leaving Sandpoint to scout goblin movement, as well as Sheriff Hemlock and his men mounting up to ride to Magnimar to requisition reinforcements.

Emrael takes Arda aside to ask a favor, swearing the gnomish cleric to secrecy on her faith. She admits that she has traveled to Sandpoint to find the cause of a recent flare-up of the ancient runewell her druidic clan has guarded throughout history, and she was guided to Sandpoint to look for someone named Mvashti who might know something about it. Arda asks around and eventually finds out from Father Zantus that Mvashti is a Varisian seer of ancient age and dubious merit, that the organized clergy don’t think too much of. Arda visits Mvashti’s manorhouse, somewhat concerned about the impression her own faith will make, and finds that she is out of town.

Meanwhile, Dereth is eager to pursue the lead of the missing City Watch during the goblin raid and ends up putting a little leverage on Hemlock in order to see the note delivered from Lonjiku Kaijitsu even though the sheriff is trying to mobilize to leave. The sheriff begrudgingly gives the note to him and departs, clearly frustrated at the party’s growing attempts to usurp him as enforcers of the law. The party decides to take the note to Ameiko at the Rusty Dragon to see if she can confirm that the signature is her fathers, despite being estranged from him.

Ameiko, unfortunately, is not at her tavern, and Bethana (the tavern manager) doesn’t know where she went. The party decides to plan ahead for an upcoming excursion against the goblin tribes and purchases a mule and expedition supplies, getting a good deal because the local hostler is a little goblin-killing-crazy and views them as local heroes, expounding at length about the glory of slaughtering the little buggers. They return to the tavern to await Ameiko, but the hour begins to grow late and the hearth fire turns to embers as they find themselves staying up into the night with no sign of her.

Growing concerned, Bethana agrees to search Ameiko’s room and finds a note written in the Tsian script of the Kaijitsu family. Arda takes the opportunity to prepare a comprehend languages spell and deciphers the note:

Hello, sis!

I hope this letter finds you well, and with some free time on your hands, because we’ve got something of a problem. It’s to do with father. Seems that he might have had something to do with Sandpoint’s recent troubles with the goblins, and I didn’t want to bring the matter to the authorities because we both know he’d just weasel his way out of it. You’ve got some pull here in town, though. If you can meet me at the Glassworks at midnight tonight, maybe we can figure out how to make sure he faces the punishment he deserves. Knock twice and then three times more and then once more at the delivery entrance and I’ll let you in.

In any case, I don’t have to impress upon you the delicate nature of this request. If news got out, you know these local rubes would assume that you and I were in on the whole thing too, don’t you? They’ve got no honor at all around these parts. I still don’t understand how you can stand to stay here.

Anyway, don’t tell anyone about this. There are other complications as well, ones I’d rather talk to you in person about tonight. Don’t be late.

Tsuto

The party armors up, checks their weapons, and prepares to investigate the Glassworks.

Approaching in the middle of the night, they find the glassworks active, with smoke pouring out of the chimney and faint forge-glows seen through the covered windows – not necessarily totally unusual, as being a major business of the town, the workers there sometimes worked through the night to fulfill orders. Investigating around the building, they hear the sounds of shattering glass, shrieks, and goblinish cackling. Clearly the building has actually become infested.

The adventurers kick in the rear entry and make their way into the work room to find goblins making grisly amateur glass art with the severed bodies of the former staff. Dereth launches a number of sleep spells and Ulric charges in, keeping the goblins relatively bottlenecked. Hot glassworks are thrown about and goblins are slaughtered, though poor Arda does take some damage. The last goblin flees out the opposite exit, yelling for his master, and the party makes a rough barricade, preparing for reinforcements, which end up not coming. Lonjiku is found at this point, having suffered a horrible death, encased in molten glass.

Exploring the rest of the Glassworks reveals the last goblin having fled into the cellar, the rest of the building ransacked but revealing little except for an opened and ransacked safe. The adventurers descend below to find that parts of the cellar have been recently broken through, revealing older passageways. They manage to ambush the remaining goblin and his boss, a Tsian archer/monk who turns out to be Ameiko’s brother Tsuto.

After a challenging fight that nearly leads to the death of Dereth,Tsuto sacrifices himself, decreeing that he would be resurrected once his lover had acquired enough power. Ulric is shocked to see a subtle vision of Tsuto’s enraged soul being pulled into the older passageways beyond, passageways that might sinisterly lead to further dungeons below the Old Light.

Aftermath of the Goblins

This was a short session, as people were tired and we were missing Denys and his druid.

Arda (Nicole’s Cleric) and Ulric (Max’s fighter) return to Sandpoint the morning after the festival to take stock of the town’s recovery from the goblin raid over the next several days. Arda takes part in a much more subdued consecration ceremony for the cathedral and secures herself a position as an acolyte of the temple, receiving access to some living quarters and charging herself with the task of unraveling the mystery of the graverobbing of the temple’s previous priest.

Dereth (Graydon’s Sorcerer) is concerned about his sister (a ranger who nominally takes on the task of protecting and informing the hinterlands from monstrous threats of the wilderness) and Denys’ druid Emrael elects to search for her and packs her things and leaves. Dereth then decides to get a little investigative with the city watch and ask around about the rumor of the North Gate being unattended at the command of a local aristocrat. He uncovers that a note was delivered to the Guard on watch supposedly from Lonjiku Kaijitsu, head of one of the four major mercantile families of Sandpoint, and also the father of the Rusty Dragon’s proprietess. However he suspects that the note was a red herring, and no one seems to know who actually delivered it.

Arda and Ulric meet up with Dereth as he’s leaving the City Watch building, only to find a local housewife running towards them in hysterics, carrying a baby and with a young boy in tow. She claims her son has been having nightly visions of goblins ever since the raid and that the family dog suddenly went wild and she’s worried that her husband is hurt at the house. Her son has goblin-ish bitemarks on his arm, and so the party quickly follows her back to her house.

The house seems empty at first, but moving into the boy’s room they see the dog stabbed by a knife into the floorboards, and the husband on the floor halfway inside the closet. They move closer to investigate when the body suddenly begins twitching and scraping across the doorframe, and pulling him back and free they find the flesh around his face and shoulders partially eaten and a half-starved goblin charges out of a hole in the floor of the closet and attacks. He is summarily crushed, but the scene is still a grisly one and the family falls apart upon discovery of the tragedy. Ulric does a pretty thorough search underneath the house but finds nothing else.

As temple acolytes and the sheriff show up to deal with the body and comfort the family, the party becomes nervous that the goblin threat is not entirely eradicated. The Sheriff admits that they have found occasional goblin bodies (usually mangled by dogs or killed by their own clumsiness) around town since the raid but nothing this serious. At that point a local half-orc garbagesweep grumbles a bit about always seeing goblins down at the trash-heap, and Ulric gets a bit of a nervous feeling at the back of his neck as he looks up at the Old Light, a towering ruin on the edge of the cliff over town.

They do some poking around in the tower ruins but don’t find much (the ruins have been often explored and picked through by most of the town’s youngsters for generations now anyway) and then consult the local sage who lives next to it. The sage is a bit of a crackpot and begins rattling off all sorts of theories about the tower being some sort of ancient magical war machine ages ago when the magical Thassilonian Empire was at its height. He shows them pictures but most of the history seems speculative at best.

Ulric decides to spend the night watching the garbage heap from the rocks underneath the Old Light, looking for more goblin incursions, and a cold and damp night huddling under the shadows proves fruitless and a little frustrating. The party returns to the Rusty Dragon to eat and bathe and catch up on sleep.

The next day, the party is alerted that Shalelu and Emrael have returned to Sandpoint and are invited to a meeting with the Town Mayor, the Sheriff and Father Zantus. Shalelu apologizes for being unable to inform the town of the impending attack in time and expresses renewed interest in figuring out what organizing force was behind the raid. Sheriff Hemlock announces his plans to ride to Magnimar and recruit help from the protection supposedly offered by the city, but is concerned that it will take a few days. The Mayor asks the party to stay in town and act as protection.

Shalelu is excited to see her half-brother Dereth again but apologizes for leaving so soon to more thoroughly pinpoint the source of the raids. She promises to return and recruit the party’s help before taking any direct action, of course. Before she leaves she joins the party for a grand dinner with her friend Ameiko at the Rusty Dragon, and regails them with information about the local goblin tribes.

First day of Autumn

Sandpoint was celebrating its Swallowtail festival with the consecration of its new Cathedral, and many pilgrims and visitors had traveled to the seaside town to observe the event.

Arda (Nicole’s cleric) and Dereth (Graydon’s sorcerer) had arrived several days ago, meeting up with Max’s fighter Ulric, whom Dereth was acquainted with through his sister. Dereth had gotten notification that his friend Emrael was due to sail in in the morning of the festival so the three of them met her at the docks and introductions were made.

The adventurers made their way up to the noon release of the Swallowtail butterflies and took advantage of the free lunch offered by the various taverns and inns around town, Ulric taking them to the local Adventurer’s Inn known as The Rusty Dragon. The companions got to know each other pretty well over food and drink and found some kinship in their current circumstances.

Arda is hoping to submit her services to the Desnan faith at the new Cathedral.

Dereth is hoping to reconnect with his half-sister, Shalelu Andosana, who apparently has asked him for help.

Ulric is looking for some sort of purpose or direction after the brutal death of his mentor five years ago during the Late Unpleasantness.

Emrael has traveled to Sandpoint for “secret druidic concerns”.

As dusk approaches, the companions returned to the open square in front of the Cathedral to witness the Consecration Prayers. Father Abstalar Zantus sets off a thunderstone to call the audience to attention and begins the ceremony. It is at this point that Ulric’s dog Tyrex begins barking and growling, and soon screams can be heard coming from up the streets. Suddenly goblins appear, attempting to set buildings on fire and scaring and panicking the villagefolk.

The heros break into action, both using quick magic to prevent arson as well as driving back and fighting the goblins, covering a mass retreat of villagers as they seek shelter in the Cathedral. The goblins are poorly organized and easily distractible despite being no less vicious, murdering both a village woman and a poor manservant.

Dereth leads the rescue of a visiting nobleman named Aldern Foxglove and the party ends up facing off with a vicious goblin warrior riding what can only be described as a diseased, hairless dire rat. Foxglove is deeply appreciative and all but demands that he treats the adventurers to dinner the following day.

Thanks in part to some pyrotechnic effects cast by Dereth, the goblin attack breaks and begins fleeing, running up through the gates to be cut down by guards or jumping off the sea cliffs below. The party, Ulric especially, begins mobilizing to pursue them into the night, with the druid Arda and Tyrex tracking goblins only to find that they’ve dispersed and split up to flee to various parts of the Sandpoint Hinterlands. The group decides to run southeast through the farmlands and check in on Ulric’s homestead. Everything seems safe, with various farmsteaders out on patrol. The attack seems to have been centered on Sandpoint.

Arda and Ulric rest at the farmstead with Emrael and Dereth returning to town for a little evening investigation, Dereth especially curious about rumors that the north gate’s guard was distracted by a “mysterious nobleman” during the attack.

The next day, a far more somber consecration ceremony is held at the Cathedral, and the party discovers that the entire goblin attack may have been a diversion for a for more sinister purpose: the graverobbing of the body of Ezakien Tobyn, the old high priest of Sandpoint who perished during the Late Unpleasantness. What evil ends could such a deed be pursuing?